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In this hack-a-thon, I suggest we design our own digital humanities undergraduate/graduate degree curriculum. There are many emerging programs that offer something like digital humanities (WSU’s Digital Technology and Culture and WSU-Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture, Marylhurst’s online/hybrid DH program, Georgia Tech’s Multimodal Communication program, FSU’s Histories of Text Technologies program, UCLA’s Digital Humanities program, U of Victoria’s DH program, N. Katherine Hayles’s call for Comparative Media Studies in her new book How We Think) that we can draw on. Some questions:

1. What should students learn in a DH program? What sorts of jobs should we be preparing them for?
2. To what degree should such programs be interdisciplinary?
3. What sorts of basic courses should we offer?
4. What is digital literacy and how would we teach it across the curriculum?
5. To what degree should the curriculum be online? F2f? hybrid?
6. Should only T/T professors teach the courses? or should there be a wider variety of professionals? (People in the tech field? Lecturers/Adjuncts? Librarians? #altac professionals?)
7. How should we integrate the values of building and collaboration into the curriculum? How can programs be practical yet also retain the traditional values of a humanities education? (i.e. the critical/historical/theoretical/social contexts that have guided humanities instruction for decades).
8. Could DH programs offer collaboration between undergraduate and graduate degree programs? What would this look like?
9. How should such programs interact with the wider community around the University?
10. To what degree should such programs collaborate with different kinds of institutions? State schools? Liberal Arts College? Technical Institutions?

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I’ll be the first to admit that I find Critical Code Studies intimidating. Yet, I find the questions posed by theorists in this field to be very productive for thinking about hybrid pedagogy across disciplines, and I think that approaching this topic in discussion may help us conceptualize our work. I will bring a few resources and pose some questions to get us started, and I look forward to hearing insights from those with more experience.

This article gives a solid, if strongly worded, overview of the topic. One of its main points, that “the implication for practice and research in digital media and learning is to begin to understand how coding, algorithms and software are involved in reconfiguring learning and the learner,” might be usefully revised into a discussion prompt: how are learning and the learner being reconfigured by digital infrastructure?

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Photo by Kristen DelValle.

One of the things I find the most compelling about the digital humanities is its focus on building. Stephen Ramsay’s “On Building,” says that those involved in the digital humanities are fundamentally interested in making things – rather than exclusively focusing on the genre of criticism. I don’t believe, by the way, that criticism and building are (or have to be) mutually exclusive, but I do find his description of Alan Liu to be particularly interesting.

Being a man of great range, he [Liu] has gone on to do other very brilliant things (most significantly, in media studies), but I doubt very much if he’d be associated with DH at all had he not found his way to shop class with the rest of us bumbling hackers in the early nineties. He’s one of many crossover acts in DH, and those of us with less talent are surely more honored by the association. One of the reasons the DH community is so fond of Alan is because we feel like he gets it/us. He can talk all he wants about being a bricoleur, but we can see the grease under his fingernails. That is true of every “big name” I can think of in DH. Every single one.

The images of the craftsperson, the mechanic, and the carpenter circulate through my mind when I read this passage. As someone who teaches English, I want to make literature matter to students by showing them how it can be used to help them creatively think in other aspects of their lives. Those who do not go to graduate school, for example, may not particularly care about the intricacies of William Blake’s life (perish the thought!), but they may be inspired to integrate his visual imagery into their own creative work or take  from his ideas.

Ultimately, I’d like to use this session to brainstorm a pedagogy of making in the humanities classroom. My interests are obviously focused on literary studies, since it is my discipline, but I’m also interested in broader questions of making in the humanities. What would a pedagogy of making look like? How can we distinguish it from (yet also draw inspiration from) creative writing courses, shop classes, and studio art classes? What rubrics and assignments can we create? How can we use content from humanities courses to teach the methodologies of making things in different modalities? And what are the limitations/possibilities for implementing larger curricular changes so that dissertations, theses, and other traditionally written academic performances could be rethought in terms of building?

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In the last #digped conversation, I cited Cheryl Ball’s paper “Show, Not Tell” explaining “Most people have not been trained to view online forums as scholarly. We are encouraged to read and write, in any and every way, but ‘new media scholarship may be dismissed as having an unnecessarily fussy ‘advertising aesthetic’… making it unworthy as a scholarly text in the eyes of the reader.’” After spending time with Ball’s article for a Computers and Composition course I’m taking here at Georgia State University, I then spent some time writing a critique for a paper called “After Digital Storytelling: Video Composing in the New Media Age” by Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton. This article came out earlier this year and opens up a very interesting, and very relevant discussion about digital media production. It asks the question, “when we ask out students to produce multimodal compositions, what is it that we are asking them to do?” For many of us, this question directly translates to another: “How do I evaluate a product that deals in multimodality?” If a students creates something flashy or high in aesthetic quality, how do we begin to critique, or evaluate this?

I propose a session in which we discuss the questions above. Multimodal texts, such as video production, blog posting, or even slide shows are present in all courses we teach and it is crucial that we are clear in what we ask for from students. So I ask another question: “If we know what we are asking for, do we then know what to evaluate?” And another (they just keep coming) “what do we do with the unexpected?”

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Now that the face-to-face classroom is no longer the de facto setting for learning, what are the best practices for blending embodiment and virtuality?

I work in and study virtual classroom software in the context of my classes at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.  Living in Portland, OR but working in Los Angeles, I convene class virtually & synchronously 3 weeks each month; I commute to L.A. one week monthly, run class face-to-face, and meet with each of my students individually.

We study interfaces in addition our course content, social media.  I have also taught a Networked Culture seminar at Washington State Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture program, where students met virtually three times over the course of the semester.

My students use authoring software to make artifacts for our real-world social media campaigns and study relevant contexts such as fair use, transmedia storytelling, “playbor” (digital labor + play), mobility + ubiquitous computing, and hybrid collaboration.

Teaching seminars virtually has caused me to notice how much I blend my senses in the face-to-face classroom.  I rely on  hearing and proprioception much more than I would have guessed.  Both of those modes are significantly limited in virtual classroom software.

After our first day in the virtual classroom, one of my students said, “[virtual classroom software] is so easy.  I’m more accustomed to looking at a screen than a professor.  It scares me that this is what the classroom is going to become.”

Why do you think she said that?

Proposed subjects — please add yours:

• synchronicity & the seminar
• attention & distraction in embodied settings, virtual settings
• the fetish of the digital trace
• multi-sensory & intersensorial cognitive processing
• interface v. course content: can they really be separated?
• institutional support for, or fear of, experimentation

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I am currently working on a project entitled “Bringing Digital Humanities to the Community College and Vice Versa” and am teaching a Women Writers class (ENG260) at Lane Community College in Eugene this fall. It meets on MW in a traditional classroom and on Friday for one hour in a wired classroom. I’ve taught online for years, and am integrating blogs into my course as I have before. I am interested in sharing ideas with other CC faculty or all faculty teaching 100-200-level literature (or other humanities) classes ,to see what has worked for them before, what they’re doing now, and to share my own ideas about what digital humanities can look like at the freshman and sophomore level, especially for classes with hugely divergent preparedness in digital literacies and other literacies.

Digital storytelling? Oral history projects? Tiki-toki timelines? Online Sherlock Journals? Blogging, wikis, social media, text annotation without TEI skills? What’s possible? What are others doing?